Bold Conjectures, Volume I

_Dedicated to my parents, Joel and Robin Chipkin._

_Thank you for your love. And for your patience._

_Major support for this volume was provided by Naval Ravikant._

_Additional support by Darren Wiebe, Amaro Koberle, Tomas Geerkens, Ayush Modi, Anders Hvelplund, and Dirk Meulenbelt._

_Conjecture Institute gratefully acknowledges their generosity in advancing this work._

Physicist and philosopher David Deutsch’s two books, _The Fabric of Reality_ and _The Beginning of Infinity_, offer a deep and coherent worldview that has improved on humanity’s ideas in physics, epistemology, morality, aesthetics, and other fundamental domains of knowledge. He’s been interviewed over one-hundred times during his career, giving his readers hours of additional content that elucidates and expands upon the ideas in his books, in addition to ideas far afield from his writings.

David’s interviews provide more than enough content for a book—and that is precisely what we’ve done. _Bold Conjectures, Volume I: Select Interviews of David Deutsch_ is a compilation of over a dozen interviews of David Deutsch.

We have transcribed about seventy interviews that did not make it into this publication. Fortunately, the _Bold Conjectures_ series will not end after its first volume.

To be sure, the _Bold Conjectures_ series will not only consist of David Deutsch interview transcripts. For example, a subsequent volume will consist of original essays by select physicists about various topics, written for a lay audience. Ideally, many future Bold Conjecture volumes will follow the spirit of John Brockman and consist of original essays by world-class thinkers.

As you read this compendium, please remember that you are reading transcriptions of extemporaneous speech. Therefore, you may encounter imprecisions, accidental contradictions, and awkward sentences that sound acceptable in audio form but less so in written form. This does not reflect on any of the speakers whose words I have transcribed.

Please note that David Deutsch’s views may have changed since the times of the transcribed interviews found in this compendium (for instance, his views on free will, time travel, the nature of constructor theory, and other things have evolved).

Brackets indicate a word or phrase that I couldn’t make out from the interview audio, or else that I slightly modified for grammatical purposes.

Interview dates should be considered approximate.

Any errors you find in the transcript are due to me.

Yours,

Logan Chipkin

President & Cofounder, Conjecture Institute